PRECISELY TRACKING SURFACE.
The Curious Case of the Chinese Gum Tin.
I’m like a moth to a flame for seemingly unsolvable internet phenomena. I notice one small, odd detail and fall into the soft glow of my screen, falling deeper into a digital rabbit hole. I navigate through strange segments of images in Google Lens, dust off long forgotten webpages on the Wayback Machine, and toggle through Google Translate settings to decipher a webpage that probably just gave my computer a virus. Seconds turn to minutes, turn to hours.
The architecture of the Internet is fragile; its structure is Swiss cheese (many holes). In January, I wrote about how a vibe pic took me from Kazakhstan to South Korea, pushing me into strange, forgotten corners of the internet as I considered how much context is stripped away by social media. On a quiet evening a few weeks ago, the purchase of a mousepad featuring two tilted palm trees and a baby blue ocean led me first toward insanity, and then into the epicenter of the Chinese decorative tin manufacturing industry.
Welcome to Public Service.
Note: This essay was originally published on the One Thing newsletter, which is excellent and worth subscribing to. If you’ve already read that version, please still “like” this one and pretend it’s new to you.
嚼5块口香糖的感觉
Rubbing dust off the bottom of my computer mouse feels like I’m wiping its butt. Every day, wipe wipe wipe. Every day, more dust and lint stuck to the bottom as I drag it around the raw surface of my desk. Like so many small annoyances, I spent three months telling myself that I would buy a mousepad to end my suffering and three months forgetting to buy the mousepad. A Sisyphean cycle of minor annoyance until things went one wipe too far. I finally relented, and with a few clicks through a sea of near-identical options, I chose one superimposed with a vista of palm trees and sand, of blue skies and bluer ocean; it’s like sending my Magic Mouse to the White Lotus. It also provided a boost of nostalgia, as I am almost certain that I had this same mousepad as a child.
The rationale when picking this particular piece of rubber was that maybe, just maybe, the €8.99 mousepad might scratch the eternal itch of nostalgia for a time when connection to the internet required a hope, a prayer, and a modem. Instead, thanks to one very strange product image, I very nearly went mad. In this image, the mousepad is on a desk (sans mouse, controversial!) and paired with a framed photo of someone showing belly in ill-fitting jean shorts, a potted plant that looks to be full of mini M&Ms, and… a tin of 5 Gum… from China.
Being an obsessive-compulsive, the sight of this strangely out-of-place gum sent me deep into a Google Lens rabbit hole. I’m not a gum historian, but real chewers will note that 5 Gum traditionally does not come in tins, but in plastic packaging. Curious… Now, I will not reveal how long I spent on this search, but I can confirm that this exact packaging seems to exist only in one other place: a now-defunct Chinese website called tiehe88. Thanks to some Wayback Machine digging, the business is called Max Can Co., Ltd. and specializes in tin boxes. Although this iteration of their website appears to have shut down in 2023, the brand now operates from the more SEO-friendly URL maxtincan.com.
Cosmetic tins, tea tins, food tins; it had every tin you could want—including one for deer placenta paste. My particular favorite is this demented “tinplate wedding candy jar SpongeBob cookie box” that exists solely on this website and in this equally demented tweet captioned “Hello,I a tin box for gift packing, do you need me?” It’s too grainy and odd to be AI (I think), and makes Mr. SquarePants look like he’s gone blind in one eye, had his limbs forcibly removed, and been dyed pink; that last detail would make perfect fodder for a Manosphere “they’re emasculating SpongeBob!!” rage bait video.
The only product they don’t seem to have is the one I came to find. This mythical 5 Gum tin may be trapped within a mouse pad advertisement, but thanks to my incessant digital digging, it’s also taken on new meaning. By the powers vested in me by this newsletter, it has become a metaphor for reclaiming that mythical thing known as “the creative process.”
It’s something that, by its nature, is difficult to put into words. Everyone has a different process, but unless you’re ChatGPT, it likely doesn’t involve going straight from point A to point B. Curiosity doesn’t take a direct path; attention drifts and shiny things (like, say, gum tins) float into your periphery and capture you. Chasing that curiosity is key to keeping the muscle of creativity from atrophying. I can say with certainty that my mousepad hunt was pointless, but that’s entirely the point. Unlike the bland sameness of social media, you never know what you’ll find when you scratch past the surface.
In my case, I found demented gay Spongebob and learned about global trade routes, which I believe now makes me overqualified to run the United States of America. With a few clicks, my mousepad was ordered and on its way to me, arriving less than 24 hours later in an unceremonious brown package wrapped in plastic.
With the product now taking up residence on my desk instead of being echoed across various digital shopfronts, there’s a newfound vibrance to this floppy piece of non-slip rubber. The green palm fronds feel lush; the tranquility of the shore merges with the sky in shades of blue. This product that saved me from wiping dust off the bottom of my Magic Mouse has unintentionally become an emblem of nostalgia. One glance and I feel transported back to the hulking, noisy desktop computer in my mom’s room that I used to spend hours on, dragging a wired mouse around a similar stock image scene. That was decades ago, when the internet was something held inside bulky, stationary machines. Now it slips into our pocket, straps onto our wrists, or merges with our vision.
Part of me bought this specific mousepad out of a yearning for that simpler time, and I do feel a bit of that desire placated. But looking at it also feels like staring at that Beijing billboard of a clear blue sky glowing through a wall of smog. The omnipresence of the internet can be suffocating. I’m still seeking ways to be less online and breathe a bit easier, and maybe the answer isn’t going to come to me via a high-quality Lycra piece of fabric with an ultra-smooth surface that allows my mouse to glide over it like a cloud. But I’d rather take my chances on my tacky, tropical little mousepad than endure an algorithm trained to funnel #vacation slop into our social media troughs.
